The few stubborn leaves
clinging to their branches
bright like Christmas lights
against the gray winter sky

The others mixed with water
and painting the sidewalk
in an autumn gloss

I spent a lot of time in the garden this morning. I like my Sunday mornings pulling weeds. Around 8:00 I have the garden to myself, listening to the birds and feeling the dirt underneath my fingernails. I spend my time digging around my head as much as in the dirt, and this week was no exception.

Things have been a little tough lately, and I feel at a loss for how to smooth them over. I can’t help but compare myself now to the self a year ago- more sex, less stress, more energy. Then, not now. I worry that I’m falling back into old habits and that I haven’t made as much progress as I thought. Those are the dark thoughts.

My garden thoughts are a little different- more dewy, more forgiving. I have been working hard to understand how I handle stress, and how unforgiving my libido can be. I realize now that I struggle more with depression than I thought I did- I have my big seasonal cycle, but I also have little spots here and there that sneak up on me. My energy levels are way down—I set aside the evening and night to do things that are meaningful to me (write, photos, time with Rob) to free up my days and let me get done what I need to (work, groceries, cleaning, etc.), but by the time MY time rolls around, all I want to do is sleep. I know I’m not trying to do too much during the busy times—my old self would be mortified at how little I accomplish these days— and I just don’t know how to solve it. I’m practically immune to coffee and sugar doesn’t jive with the needed weight loss.

I’m terrified because this is one of the few things that can’t just be fixed by changing my schedule, my job, my habits. At least I don’t think- and that seems to be the most terrifying part. I can’t say I know anyone who successfully manages their depression- I’m a bit without a resource. I’ve toyed with the idea of a therapist, but who’s to say that’ll work? And it’s not like my company is paying for it. What if Freud was wrong? What if talking about it doesn’t do a damn bit of good?

Maid, mother, crone.  The more I explore my fertility and think about having children, the more I feel in touch with my role as a woman. 

It feels weird being on the cusp of maid and mother—kind of floating between the roles, a place of expectation and sorrow.  I’m afraid to relinquish the role of maid, sad even, to move into this new phase of my life.  Scared, too, to leave something so familiar behind.  But I can’t help move forward to mother, I feel drawn to it.  I want to embrace this time, though, this time of transition- we don’t get too many of those.  In the last year, I think I’ve begun to appreciate the instability and uncertainty in life.  Transitions are most beautiful in their fleetingness- if Fall lasted forever, where would the crisp fall melancholy come from?  And Spring, what beauty would be lost if all the flowers were perfectly poised, eternally ready to split and blossom?  The beauty of the moment before is tied to the moment after—without one, you cannot truly have the other.  So maid is all the more beautiful for its loss to mother, and mother for its loss to crone. 

To Create.

I want to write, but I know I’m too drunk to do so.  Too bad, I feel my tongue loosening, like I may something provocative—at least incendiary.  Why is it that writing, what used to be so hard NOT to do, requires a calculated time and space?
 
I want to be a mother, I think.  I’m terrified, and trying desperately to convince myself that it’s not the time.  That there are bills to pay and houses to buy and life to live—but the baby bug is strong and hits me when I’m weakest.  I want to feel a part of the world around me, a part of nature, of the spring.  It’s cruel. 
 
The world around me is ripe with creation and I am barren by choice.  Of course, becoming a mother is a frightening proposition.  How easily I loose myself in those around me now—what will it be like when I have kids?  As hard as it is for me to make time now, even for the gym, which is arguably to get me in shape for child bearing, how hard will it be for me to find time once I’ve become a mother?  I’m terrified.  What if I become the Jade I was back home?  Totally concerned with others while I fade away, wilting inside myself, screaming silently?

I feel nervous putting pen to paper—I have unreasonably high expectations for whatever comes of it.  It feels good, though—refreshing and full of promise. Like I could get good at it again.  Well, as good as any teenager with a squeaky clean idealistic world view could possibly have been.

And maybe that’s the point—I have more to think about now, and hopefully more to say.  I have been afraid to mine my recent experiences in case I came across something I couldn’t handle, but now I worry that the memories have faded too much.  I want to write about the storm, but so many details are already lost.  Burden or blessing- I guess we’ll never know.  Such a vivid moment—and me, too sleepy to stare, wide-eyed, and commit it to the depths of memory.  I kept the memory to myself for a while—selfish but beautiful and entirely mine.  Even Dave didn’t see the moment I saw—he was too busy being a part of it.

So I'm driving to work the other day and when I get out of my car to walk inside, I accidentally breathed in the purest scent of heaven I've ever smelled. Well, I was pretty darn surprised to find heaven just laying around in the middle of Salem, but I suppose heaven can be anywhere it darn well wishes to be, can't it?

Of course, I should have been MORE surprised that I was smelling anything at all. Because it is finally Spring. And I think folks have been keeping a very big secret all these years-- Spring is BEAUTIFUL in the Pacific NW.

That morning, I smelled the damp warmth that comes from rich earth soaked with a soft rain. I smelled the blossoms of plum trees in two fantastic shades. I smelled the dew on the grass and the warmth of the sun curving around the eastern edge of the earth. That's right-- I smelled the sunshine. Because it's Spring. And I think, with Spring, up here, I finally understand what it is to have bear magic.

I’m in a strange place between awareness and action.  It is a lost place, a lonely place.  All the pieces fell disjointed and ill-fitting, as if all my life I will fight the same battles over and over again.  I feel trapped between all and nothing.  I am sure of nothing, no one—especially myself.  Emotional and psychological limbo.  Who am I? Who do I really have the capacity to be?  Am I fooling myself? 
 
I just about cried at the dinner table tonight— not while eating, but sitting there nonetheless.  And I wanted to just let it all go— just sit there weeping into my hands for no reason at all— release.  There’s fire behind these eyes, yes, but also water.  Cold, salty, pointless water.  Not pointless, I guess, but unfocused.I feel like the shell, like the outline of the person I can be.  But, for once in my life, I don’t know how I’m going to get there.

It’s not the rain, or the greenness.  It’s not the produce or the difference in sites and stores; It’s the sound of seagulls that most reminds me that I’m not in New Mexico any more.  Every once in a while, I’ll hear a flock of seagulls and just feel from head to toe away from the desert.  For all the rain and bounty of the summer, we never heard seagulls.

Eventually memories, good and bad, fade.  If you don’t make new ones, I think you fade with them.